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N February 11 2012, Whitney Houston was found in a bathtub at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, drowned due to drug intoxication. When Cat Marnell, the New York party animal and blogger, heard the news, she took her own cocktail of drugs, sat down, and wrote perhaps her finest piece yet.

In “On the death of Whitney Houston: why I won’t ever shut up about my drug use”, Marnell, a 29-year-old former beauty editor, ditched the bravado that had characterised many of her articles on addiction. “Look how easy it is, even when you are Whitney f***ing Houston, to withdraw your voice and pretend like you’re a good girl and not mention that you’re using,” she wrote. “To slip silently into the water. To disappear.”

The article, published on the website XoJane.com, was a hit, and Marnell found herself under intense scrutiny. Profiles began to appear in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal of this beautiful, drug-addicted wild child.

Nothing titillates us more than a slowmotion car crash, and Marnell narrated hers in style. “Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night,” she told the New York Post, “when I could be on the rooftop of [New York nightclub] Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust.”